Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961)
is an American poet. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches
Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and
is Senior Editor of PennSound. He hosted a weekly radio show at
WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published ten books of
poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001) and
Day (2003) and Goldsmith’s American trilogy, The
Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports,
(2008). He is the author of a book of essays, Uncreative
Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (2011). As editor
he published I’ll be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol
Interviews (2004) and is the co-editor of Against
Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011). He
resides in New York City with his wife, artist Cheryl Donegan and
his two sons. I emailed Kenneth about his work, and his new book
Seven
American Deaths and Disasters.

(The above introductory paragraph was lifted directly from
the
Wikipedia page on Kenneth Goldsmith, except for the last
sentence. If you’re wondering why that’s appropriate here, keep
reading.)

Mark Allen: In your new book Seven American Deaths and
Disasters you’ve transcribed radio and television reports of
national tragedies like JFK’s assassination and Michael Jackson’s
death. I found the book riveting, melancholic, surreal, mundane and
informative. Why commemorate these events in this way?

Kenneth Goldsmith: These transcriptions are from
airchecks of major disasters unfolding in real time. Listening to
them, it made me wonder: what are the words we use to describe
something we never thought we’d have to describe? These DJs woke up
thinking they were going to the station for a regular day and then
they were in the position of having to narrate, say, 9-11 or the
Kennedy assassination, to the world. They were completely
unprepared and in their speech, you can hear this. It’s stunning.
The slick curtain of media is torn, revealing acrobatic linguistic
improvisations. There was a sense of things spinning out of
control: facts blurred with speculation as the broadcasters
attempted to furiously weave convincing narratives from shards of
half-truths. Usually confident DJs were now riding by the seat of
their pants, splaying raw emotion across the airwaves: smooth
speech turned to stutter, laced with doubt and fear. Unhinged from
their media personalities, these DJs became ordinary citizens, more
like guys in a bar than representatives of purported rationality
and truth. Opinions—some of them terribly misinformed—inflected and
infected their supposedly objective reportage. Racism and
xenophobia were rampant— somehow the DJs couldn’t help themselves.
Technical fuck-ups abounded: on-the-scene reporters were nowhere to
be found, cell phones went unanswered, audio clips ended abruptly,
eyewitnesses were absent. And then there was silence—the greatest
fear of broadcasters—lots of dead air. It was as if the essence of
media was being revealed whilst its skin was in tatters.
Unwittingly structuralist, the whole thing felt like a Godard film.
I felt I had to transcribe and capture this amazing speech on the
page, hence this book.

I recently learned Werner Herzog teaches a screenwriting
class where a required reading is The Warren Commission
Report on JFK’s assassination, which he calls “the ultimate
crime story” and an excellent example of a screenplay based
entirely on how it’s written, and it’s a government
document.

Wow, I didn’t know that but it doesn’t surprise me. Herzog, more
than anyone knows that real life trumps fiction every time. A great
document along these lines to read is the transcript of the Richard
Prince appropriation deposition put out by Greg Allen of greg.org. I think it’s the most
comprehensive and instructive manual ever written on appropriation.
And beyond that, it’s a work of appropriated literature authored by
Allen. (I’ve written a long essay about this work
here.)

Your 2000 book Fidget transcribes every single
movement your body made during thirteen hours. In your 2003 book,
Day, you chronologically re-typed every single word from
every page of a copy of The New York Times. Your later
trilogy, Weather, Traffic and Sports, transcribe random
radio reports. Now with Seven American Deaths and Disasters
you’re transcribing reports of specific events. Is your work slowly
leaning towards a more non-fictional, storytelling
approach?

For the past twenty years, I’ve been fascinated with rendering
the mundane in language. In hindsight, my archival impulse arose
concurrent with the internet, which also seemed intent on creating
a vast warehouse of our most commonplace experiences—at least in
the early days—in words. It immediately became clear to me the
digital condition was going to be one of abundance, storing more
words than I’d ever be able to consume. As a response, I made big
books which, even in paper, reflected this new relationship to
language.

But after ten books of quotidian compilations, an unexpected
thing happened: I began tire of the everyday. After all, the job of
retyping the entire internet could go on forever, driving me to
seek a new line of investigation. Still deeply entrenched in a
digital ethos, I remained tied to a mimetic and uncreative way of
writing, yet found myself struggling with how to expand my focus
without radically altering my long-standing practice. So now I’ve
turned to transcribing events and texts that are drenched in drama
and emotion, as opposed to transcribing the ordinary and dull. It’s
the identical writing act—still wildly uncreative—only I’ve moved
the frame from one subject to another, naturally giving the texts
new results.

You founded and edit UbuWeb, an exhaustive historical
collection of avant-garde visual, concrete and sound poetry, film,
sound art—all viewable online and most unavailable elsewhere. It
includes thousands of works, everything from the complete
multimedia archives of the late-60s/early-70s art magazine
Aspen, to Kurt Kren’s film September 20, to Yoko
Ono’s film Fly, and everything in-between. How did you amass
such a collection? How can one experience it all in one
lifetime?

You see, we are
faced with a situation in which the managing of information has
become more important than creating new and original
information.

I’m a collector by nature and have been working on this for
seventeen years. If you work on something a little bit every day,
you end up with something that is massive. It’s so big that I’m not
even sure what is on there anymore. Better to think of it like a
library—who can read every book in the library?

But UbuWeb is really unstable. Cobbled together, operating on no
money and an all-volunteer staff, Ubu was never meant to be a
permanent archive. Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our
ISP pulls the plug, our university support dries up, or we simply
grow tired of it. Acquisition by a larger entity is impossible:
nothing is for sale. We don’t touch money. Watch out. It won’t be
there forever.

In 2011, you read at the White House to President and Mrs.
Obama, as part of A Celebration of American Poetry. (Jon Stewart
even made fun of your outfit in a
segment on “The Daily Show.”) Did you meet the President? What
did he and the First Lady seem to think of your work? What was Mrs.
Obama wearing?

When I was invited to read at the White House, I wondered aloud
to a colleague whether if, asked by the G.W. Bush administration to
read, would I have accepted? To which my colleague responded,
“Kenny, you never would’ve been asked to read at the G.W. Bush
White House.” The fact that they would even have someone like me
there at a poetry event signals a paradigmatic shift (one among
many, of course).

I did an afternoon poetry workshop with Michelle Obama, who sat
in front of me as I made my usual arguments against creativity and
for copyleft, file-sharing, and free culture. She appeared to be
riveted and even asked questions. It was surreal. She was wearing a
gorgeous beaded and sequined skirt, a skin-tight mauve tank top,
and shiny, pea-green pumps. She was super-mellow and put everyone
else at ease when she said in a slangy sort of voice, “Aw, c’mon,
everybody. Let’s relax, let’s have some fun. This is poetry, after
all!” After that, I said fuck it and relaxed—this ain’t no Laura
Bush or Mamie Eishenhower—and had a good time.

Michelle Obama’s shoes.

That evening, with the President sitting five feet away from me,
I read appropriated texts. Nobody flinched. I put together a short
set featuring The Brooklyn Bridge, and presented three takes on it,
including Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Hart Crane’s “To
Brooklyn Bridge,” finally finishing with an excerpt from my book
Traffic, which is 24-hours worth of transcribed traffic
reports from a local New York news station. The crowd, comprised of
arts administrators, Democratic party donors, and various Senators
and mayors, respectfully sat through the “real” poetry—the Whitman
and Crane—but when the uncreative texts appeared, the audience was
noticeably more attentive, seemingly stunned that the quotidian
language and familiar metaphors from their world—congestion,
infrastructure, gridlock—could be framed somehow as poetry. It was
a strange meeting of the avant-garde with the everyday, resulting
in a realist poetry—or should I say hyperrealist poetry—that was
instantly understood by all in the room; let’s call it radical
populism. It was really fucking bizarre, to say the least.

You teach a course called “Uncreative Writing” at University
of Pennsylvania, where you encourage students to turn off their
creative instincts, retype phone books and menus, and plagiarize
other writer’s work as their own content. Some students call your
class brilliant; some faculty at the school have publicly denounced
your pro-plagiarism stance as irresponsible. How is all this
helping the next generations of writers and journalists?

The students that take my class know how to write. I can hone
their skills further but instead I choose to challenge them to
think in new and different ways. Many of them know how to
plagiarize but they always do it on the sly, hoping not to get
caught. In my class, they must plagiarize or they will be
penalized. They are not allowed to be original or creative. So it
becomes a very different game, one in which they’re forced to
defend choices that they are making about what they’re plagiarizing
and why. And when you start to dig down, you’ll find that those
choices are as original and as unique as when they express
themselves in more traditional types of writing, but they’ve never
been trained to think about it in this way.

You see, we are faced with a situation in which the managing of
information has become more important than creating new and
original information. Take Boing
Boing, for instance. They’re one of the most powerful blogs on
the web, but they don’t create anything, rather they filter the
morass of information and pull up the best stuff. The fact of Boing
Boing linking to something far outweighs the thing that they’re
linking to. The new creativity is pointing, not making. Likewise,
in the future, the best writers will be the best information
managers.

The Museum of Modern Art just appointed you as their first
Poet Laureate for the 2013 winter/spring term. What are you going
to do?

I want to infuse the museum with poetry. I’m hosting a reading
series called “Uncontested Spaces: Guerilla Readings in the MoMA
Galleries” where writers and artists like Heidi Julavits, Charles
Bernstein, John Zorn, Rick Moody, Sheila Heti, and David Shields go
into a gallery of their choice and do a reading in front of an
artwork they feel connected to. This is normally impossible, since
the galleries are mandated to be silent.

On March 20, I’ll be doing a Poet Laureate lecture called “My
Career in Poetry or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Institution,” which proposes that poetry’s next—or final—move is
institutional critique.

And finally there will be a bus tour around lower Manhattan
while I read excerpts from my work in progress, Capital,
which is a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades
Project, written for New York in the twentieth century.

We’ll see if we can move this institution like we moved the
White House. I think I have my work cut out for me.

In your collection of essays Uncreative Writing: Managing
Language in a Digital Age you claim, since all images and video
on the internet are text-based (HTML code), we are at an exciting
crossroads for a cultural merging of visual arts and the written
word. Can you talk a little about that?

This is a great challenge to traditional notions of writing. In
the digital age, language (aka code) has become materialized,
taking on a whole new dimension (although one that had been
proposed throughout various avant-garde movements during the
twentieth-century: futurisms, concrete poetry, and language poetry,
and so forth—which is why the 20th c. avant-garde is more relevant
than ever).

Words are no longer just for telling stories. Now language is
digital and physical. It can be poured into any conceivable
container: text typed into a Microsoft Word document can be parsed
into a database, visually morphed in Photoshop, animated in Flash,
pumped into online text-mangling engines, spammed to thousands of
email addresses and imported into a sound editing program and spit
out as music; the possibilities are endless.

Clearly this is a far cry from the Romantic notion of a writer
hammering out original works of genius on a typewriter in a garret.
Yet much writing proceeds like the internet never happened. Look at
most literary fiction: you get guys like Will Self saying things
like, “The internet is of no relevance at all to the business of
writing fiction directly, which is about expressing certain kinds
of verities that are only found through observation and
introspection.” Really? That’s scary.

In Uncreative Writing you talk about having access to
the Warhol Museum archives, to listen to the tapes of Andy speaking
on the phone that were used to create The Warhol Diaries,
and you seemed fascinated to discover hours and hours of
un-transcribed recordings that were left out of the book because
they were deemed “too boring.” In general, “interesting” seems like
an anathema to your approach. How do you think writers and
journalists can improve their work by embracing “boring?”

John Cage said, “If something is boring after two minutes, try
it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then
thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
So what is boring? I find narrative boring. I find truth boring. I
once wrote an essay called Being
Boring” where I claim to be the most boring writer who has ever
lived. I can’t even read my own books—I keep falling asleep. But
they’re great to talk about and think about. So I think we need to
redefine our relationship to boring. Reality TV is boring with all
the boring parts taken out of it. Instead, go watch An American
Family from the early 70s, at this weird moment where
mainstream TV fell under the spell of Andy Warhol. You’ll never be
bored in the same way again.

I don’t think that journalists can be boring because to do so
would be to shed too much truth on what they do. They’re mostly
writing boring stuff, they’re bored, their editors are bored, and
their readers are also bored, but nobody will admit it. Again, it’s
here that Warhol is prescient. When asked if he reads reviews of
his works, he replied, that he doesn’t—he only adds up the column
inches.

I did radio with you at WFMU in the mid-00s. Your radio show,
which ran from 1995-2010, seemed to push the format as far as
possible. By 2010 you were broadcasting three hours of silence,
which you would break every thirty minutes with a station ID. The
station staff was often angry with you and the listeners always
complained it was the most unlistenable radio imaginable. Will you
ever return to the airwaves?

Oh, I adored doing radio but sadly, I don’t think I’ll be going
back. I was given free rein to do whatever I wanted on the airwaves
and I took full advantage of it, much to the chagrin of the staff
and listening audience, as you say. But I finally hit a wall. I’d
done everything possible and there was nothing left to do. I’m
eternally grateful for that opportunity, but I am finished.

Well, in the utopian moment of 2005, everything was on the
internet. It was amazing. But then came the Megaupload lockdown and
the subsequent blogosphere crackdown, which you’ve so eloquently
parsed
here, and suddenly the internet was bereft of great stuff. So
now there’s an enormous rebuilding effort but I feel it’s like
rebuilding a beachfront home after Sandy: it’s just a matter of
time till it gets whacked again.

I feel so sorry for those who have built castles made of
sand—and even sadder for them when they attempt to rebuild and then
file-hosts change their policies again, once more emaciating them.
It breaks my heart.

My advice: Build your own library. Don’t trust the cloud. If you
love something, download it. It won’t be there forever.

You often quote conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, who in
1969 wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less
interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems to be a
personal mantra. So what keeps you going?

Oh, I’m old. And I came of age and had a career made in the
traditional way by publishing books, getting them reviewed in the
“right” places, and having the “right” critics behind me and so
forth. So I’m all set. But I’m concerned for a younger generation
who don’t have the time-tested structures to rely on. How can an
emerging poet make a career in a time when there are few vertical
structures to identify, support, and raise it above the others? The
arbiters of taste seemed to have evaporated. Even with poets
creating paper books, there doesn’t seem to be the support there.
For instance, the emerging poet Steven Zultanski just put out what
I feel to be perhaps the most important book of his generation
called Agony.
In the old days, this one book alone would’ve made his career. Now
it’s just another in a sea of Lulu publications and Facebook
likes.

All of which
makes me think that for writers, careers and canons won’t be
established in traditional ways. Literary works—and careers—might
function the same way that memes do today on the web.

The Troll Thread
Collective and Gauss
PDF are publishing the most incredible stuff—reams of shit
grabbed from the internet, set into book form, and ported out to
Lulu. They’re making the most impossible books. Why? Because they
can. Will anyone ever materialize them from Lulu? Or read them?
They don’t really seem to care. Tan Lin, too, publishes his books
in multiple Lulu remixed versions. Like a dance remix, it’s
impossible to keep track of which is the official version. This,
then, is the next wave of conceptual writing.

All of which makes me think that for writers, careers and canons
won’t be established in traditional ways. Literary works—and
careers—might function the same way that memes do today on the web,
spreading like wildfire for a short period, often unsigned and
un-authored, only to be supplanted by the next ripple. While the
author won’t die, we might begin to view authorship in a more
conceptual way: perhaps the best authors of the future will be ones
who can write the best programs with which to manipulate, parse and
distribute language-based practices. Even if, as Christian Bök
claims, poetry in the future will be written by machines for other
machines to read, there will be, for the foreseeable future,
someone behind the curtain inventing those drones; so that even if
literature is reducible to mere code—an intriguing idea—the
smartest minds behind them will be considered our greatest authors.
Hold on to your hat. It’s a wild ride ahead.

When I first approached you I mentioned making this interview
“adhere to your aesthetic practices in some way, in form or
presentation,” you said you were up for anything. But after
talking, we both decided to just do a straightforward interview.
Why do you think this conclusion was ultimately reached? You
mentioned journalists, editors and readers are all “bored.” Don’t
you think the standard interview format—which is all around us…
from celebrities in entertainment magazines, to politicians on the
news, to chats with writers on websites—is ripe for re-examination?
Or parody?

Ah, I fooled you! Nothing here is new. It’s all been poached
from elsewhere. The answers to the first and third questions, for
instance, are taken directly—word for word—from the afterword of
Seven American Deaths and Disasters. The fourth question is
taken from UbuWeb’s mission statement. The fifth question about the
White House is taken from my forthcoming Poet Laureate Lecture that
I will deliver at MoMA on March 20th. The sixth answer comes from
the introduction to Uncreative Writing. The seventh is from a
proposal statement I had to write for the MoMA laureateship. The
eighth is from a keynote lecture that I delivered at Transmediale
in Berlin just last week. The ninth answer is from my manifesto
“Being Boring.” The tenth answer comes from a blog post I did on
the Poetry Foundation blog. The eleventh answer is a paraphrase
from my piece for The Wire called, “Six File Sharing Epiphanies.”
The twelfth answer comes from several of my previous interviews,
all mashed together.

Now the trick here was that I massaged most of these slightly to
make them all seem new—adding words, streamlining tenses and so
forth. This is something known as patchwriting—a way of weaving
together various shards of preexisting texts into a tonally
cohesive whole and presenting it as if it’s original. It’s a trick
that students use all the time rephrasing, say, a Wikipedia entry
into their own words. And if they’re caught, it’s trouble: In
academia, patchwriting is considered an offense equal to that of
plagiarism.

(The above explanation of patchwriting was taken from the
introduction to Uncreative Writing.)

The master of the interview, of course, was Andy Warhol, who I
took a lot from. I edited a book of interviews with Warhol about a
decade ago. I got the idea from the book when I was leafing through
a compilation of essays about Warhol released by October
magazine and the last piece in the book was an interview with Andy
by the Marxist art critic Benjamin Buchloh from 1985. It seemed
that the more pointed Buchloh’s questions became, the more elusive
Andy’s answers were. Buchloh would hit harder and Warhol would get
slipperier, repeating things he’d said many times before as if
Buchloh’s questions were irrelevant. In the end, I realized that by
saying so little, Warhol was inverting the traditional form of the
interview; I ended up knowing much more about Buchloh than I did
about Warhol.

(The above explanation of Warhol’s interview strategy was taken
from the introduction to my Warhol book.)

Warhol claimed that, “Art is what you can get away with,”
something I am inspired by. Artists ask questions, and they don’t
give answers. Artists make messes and leave it for others to clean
up. I’ve left a long trail of appropriated texts, dishonest
statements, and brutal pranks. I’ve stolen things that weren’t mine
and have made a career out of forgery and dishonesty. I’m proudly
fraudulent. And it’s served me well—I highly recommend it as an
artistic strategy. But really, don’t take my word for it…